Making the Best of It

Within seconds of starting to read, you’ll be there with her, in the under-heated marital home far from any city, on a chilly 7 November 1929.

There’s nothing like a diary to throw us straight into another person’s domestic world. Short sentences with no pronoun at the begin­ning take us to the heart of someone else’s hectic day. By the end of p.1 of E. M. Delafield’s immortal Diary of a Provincial Lady, first published in instalments in Time and Tide and then in book form in 1930, you’ll be experiencing some of the diarist’s nagging annoyances: with the imperious châtelaine of the Big House, Lady Boxe, who arrives unannounced and informs her that she’s planted the wrong variety of hyacinths in the wrong month; with Ethel the house-parlourmaid, who has cut the bread-and-butter too thick; and with Cook, who announces that ‘something is wrong with the range’.

First-world, middle-class problems of the late 1920s? Definitely, but no less nagging for that. By p.6 (25 November), you’ll be acquainted with the tics and traits of other members of the small cast. The Provincial Lady’s husband Robert, having made ‘an unoriginal suggestion’ about the range, has fallen asleep over his copy of The Times not once but three times. (The PL does not name herself, so I’ll call her the PL for short.) ‘Mademoiselle’, the French nanny in charge of 6-year-old Vicky, who has a runny nose, has made the first of her many dark pronouncements. ‘Ah, cette petite fille! Elle ne sera peutêtre pas longtemps pour ce bas monde.’ Robin, the PL’s 10-year-old son, has been taken out for a brief exeat from his boarding prep school, bringing a friend. He has devoured ‘several meals and a good many sweets’, and generously says, ‘It’s been nice for us, taking out Williams, hasn’t it?’

In case you’re wondering whether the PL might be more con­tented if she were living peacefully on her own without a boring, unemotional husband and a discontented cook, let Cissie Crabbe be a warning. Cissie is an old schoolfriend of the PL’s who has come to stay. A spinster vegetarian on a diet, she lives with two cats in a bed­sitter, cooking lentils on a gas ring, and Robert can’t stand her. Better, surely, to be a married, frantic PL than to be ‘singled out’ in those desolate years when there weren’t enough men to go round.

Not that the PL and her husband (he is Lady Boxe’s land agent) are so very well-off. Trying to gauge their financial status is one of the many pleasures that keeps the attentive reader of these diaries on his or her toes. How can it be that they dress for dinner, sitting down to rice shape and steamed prunes sent up from the kitchen and cleared away by Ethel, yet the PL has to go into Plymouth (the nearest city) to pawn her great-aunt’s diamond ring in order to pay the bills? She does this so frequently that the pawnbroker asks, ‘And what name shall we say this time?’ It’s a first-hand glimpse of the measures required to keep up appearances in those inter-war years.

How happy or unhappy is the PL, really? Occasional comments in parentheses give us a clue to her true feelings. A friend of hers, Barbara, arrives one morning (2 April) to announce that she’s engaged, and that ‘she has always thought a true woman’s highest vocation is home-making and that the love of a Good Man is the crown of life’. The PL writes, ‘I say Yes, Yes, to all of this. (Discover, on thinking it over, that I do not agree with any of it, and am shocked by my own extraordinary duplicity.)’

Her thoughts take her far away from her damp rural existence in which she also has to put up with extended visits from ‘Our Vicar’s Wife’, who tells her she ‘looks tired’, and recommends cinnamon, Vapex, gargling with glycerine of thymol, blackcurrant tea, Friar’s Balsam, linseed poultices and Thermogene wool for her cold. Sometimes she manages to escape to London for a few days, with Robert’s permission, to stay with her best friend, ‘dear Rose’, who takes her to pseudy literary dinner parties that refresh her soul before her return to the sticks and frozen pipes.

Yet beneath it all we glean a deep, gritted-teeth contentment with and resignation to her lot. The Diary of a Provincial Lady was an instant and lasting hit because the PL’s daily experiences tallied with those of hundreds of thousands of wives and mothers struggling in their draughty houses, with unappreciative, unromantic but per­fectly harmless husbands whom they had no intention of ever leaving. These women’s wit, their wryness, their imaginations and their inner lives (nourished by reading and by friendships with each other) kept them going.

So did their children. The loves of the PL’s life are her two offspring, particu­larly (it seems to me) her son Robin, whom she misses dread­fully when he goes back to school. A trip into town to search (in vain) for a new house-parlour­maid is redeemed by her finding, in the gutter, two undamaged cigarette cards from the set that Robin is short of: ‘Curious Beaks’. The pleasure of that find encapsulates the deep bond between mother and son.

How autobiographical is this diary? E. M. Delafield was the pseudonym of Elizabeth, née Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture, born in 1890 and married to Paul Dashwood, land agent to the Hon. (and bossy) Mrs Adams who owned the Bradfield estate in Devon. They lived at Croyle House, on the estate. They had two children, Lionel and Rosamund, the same ages as Robin and Vicky. Lionel was indeed away at boarding-school, and Rosamund was looked after by a Mademoiselle figure called Marguerite. So in many ways this is Delafield’s real life on a plate, with malfunctions of the kitchen range just hammed up a bit.

When it comes to exasperation-with-husband levels, though, Delafield does the opposite of what my grandmother Jan Struther would later (in 1938–9) do with her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns in The Times. Secretly unhappy in her own marriage, Jan Struther presented the semi-autobiographical Mrs Miniver as a supremely happy and contented wife – perhaps subconsciously hoping that by doing so she could recreate the happiness that she and her husband had lost. In this diary, E. M. Delafield presents her marriage as worse than it actually was. For example, Robert can’t bear kittens and insists (though the PL disobeys the order) on a litter being drowned, whereas Paul Dashwood was by all accounts a mild man, keen on and kind to pets. When Elizabeth and Paul were first married, they lived in Malaya for two years, where Paul was a civil engineer. It was she, rather than he, who insisted that they move back to England in 1922, to avoid the misery suffered by so many expatriate parents, of having their children shipped 6,000 miles away to school.

As Violet Powell (wife of Anthony) wrote in her eloquent and concise biography of Delafield (1988), ‘Paul followed her as the tail of a kite dances after the kite itself.’ Though he was considered by the bride’s family to be ‘a bit of a clodhopper, belonging to a somewhat Philistine race’, he would never have made a comment as boorish as Robert does to the PL about one of her friends: ‘Now that’s what I call an attractive woman.’

By the time the Diary was published, Elizabeth had already writ­ten nineteen novels. She was prolific, dashing off variations of the female experience at the rate of more than one a year, producing thirty novels in all, as well as a rather bland account of six months on a collective farm in the Soviet Union in 1937. Why is the Diary of a PL the most loved and remembered of her works? I think it is because here she found the voice that suited her best.

In that very same year of 1930, she wrote The Way Things Are, a novel in the third person that portrays a stale, dull marriage briefly enlivened by an affair. The heroine Laura’s husband Alfred falls asleep over The Times; she asks him whether he loves her and he replies, ‘I shouldn’t have married you if I didn’t.’ He doesn’t notice what she wears. They struggle financially. Their nursemaid gives notice. All very Provincial-Ladyish; but the heroine’s overtly expressed gloomy feelings – ‘How trivial and yet how infuriating was life, with recalci­trant nurses and husbands and children, and nothing to look forward to ever, and at the back of everything an eternal sense of one’s own inadequacy’ – are oddly less effective than the brushed-under-the-carpet emotions of the brisk, un-self-pitying Provincial Lady. We need that element of the diarist’s spiky, stoical, subject-changing hilarity to shine a light on the steady tedium beneath.

We do, though, need our PL to be not too successful. That is why this first of the four diaries is the best: better than The PL Goes Further, The PL in America and The PL in Wartime. Even in the second volume, she’s doing so well out of her writing that she’s now fretting about how to spend her earnings – should it be on a Rolls-Royce, electric light or a journey to the south of Spain? She acquires a flat in London, a bliss­ful bolt-hole – wonderful for her but not so wonderful for us, who thrive on her penury and provincial imprisonment.

The most exotic event of the first volume happens in July, when the PL travels to the Côte d’Azur to stay with Dear Rose and friends, for a brief, shimmering holiday, marred only by nearly drowning when swimming to an island. Describing almost drowning, she makes a typically wry comment about her whole life flashing before her, as is supposed to happen just before death: ‘Even one recollec­tion from my past, if injudiciously selected, disconcerts me in the extreme.’

It’s perfect; it’s true of us all. I wonder what the PL’s top involun­tary recollections of her past might be. Elizabeth had quite a few nasty ones to be assailed by. Aged 19, to escape her over-protective mother the novelist Mrs Henry de la Pasture, she became a postulant in a French religious order. The novice-mistress Mère Immaculée ruled the young novices with a rod of iron. They were not allowed baths or friendships. The aim was the complete destruction of individuality. If she overheard the girls whispering about their families or their pasts, she would say, ‘Allons, allons, pas d’histoires.’ Was it Elizabeth’s loathing of this rule that inspired her to spend the rest of her life telling women’s histoires?

Leaving the convent after eight gruesome months, Elizabeth lived out the long decade of her twenties unmarried, the prospect of spinsterhood horribly real. The 1920s unmarried woman’s ‘deepening terror and dismay’ would be powerfully portrayed in her novel of 1932, Thank Heaven Fasting, in which the heroine Monica’s mother is snobbish and overbearing, and Monica lives her twenties in a state of desolation, eventually accepting the proposal of the dull, passionless Herbert Pelham.

Considering all these might-have-beens, Delafield didn’t do too badly, snaffling her eligible 37-year-old husband when she was 29. Two real tragedies were waiting for her, though. In 1940, aged only 20, her adored son Lionel died from gunshot wounds in the armoury department of the Infantry Training Centre. From that moment on Elizabeth couldn’t write another word of her diary, although she did manage to produce two more novels. Then in 1941 she was brought down by a mysterious illness, requiring a colostomy. She died in 1943, aged just 53, un-self-pitying to the last.

Late in the evening of the final day of this volume (23 October), Robert asks the PL why she doesn’t get into bed. ‘I say, Because I am writing my diary. Robert replies, kindly, but quite definitely, that In his Opinion, That is a Waste of Time.’ The PL gets into bed, ‘con­fronted by Query: Can Robert be right? Can only leave reply to posterity.’

Well, posterity replies, with conviction, No. It was not a waste of time. We read into Robert’s callous words his belief that his wife’s humdrum daily life was itself a bit of a waste of time, and certainly not worth recording. Robert was wrong. Not only does this highly entertaining Diary immortalize the atmosphere and domestic details of a marriage between the wars, which makes it a fascinating docu­ment in itself: it also founded a whole new genre which survives to this day in columns all over the English-speaking world: the self- deprecating married woman giving us razor-sharp glimpses into the true meaning of ‘and they lived happily ever after’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2024

About the contributor

YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM is the author of The Real Mrs Miniver, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School and Terms & Conditions, all Slightly Foxed titles. Her most recent book is Jobs for the Girls: How We Went Out to Work in the Typewriter Age. She lives (happily ever after) in London.